last night i attended the gma awards. it was festive and i wore a suit jacket, mauvish in color. it is rare that i wear a suit jacket. i should do it more often as it made me feel grown up and productive. across the aisle from me sat one william baldwin and his wife chynna philips (you know, of wilson-philips, as in “hold on (for one more day)”, as in “you’re in love”, which means, she obviously knows and has spoken to at least one of the daughters of one brian wilson, which is, obviously, awesome.). i gave him (one william baldwin) a subtle thumbs up, as if to say, “hey man, you’re william baldwin and that is awesome. also your wife is chynna philips and that’s pretty cool too, ‘cause, you know, she probably has spoken to one of the wilson sisters and that wilson sister’s dad is brian wilson and all. it was the same thumbs up i gave to alec baldwin in the LA airport admirals club not a month ago. i wanted to tell both of them that their brother stephen called me one day 16 times in the span of 5 minutes. i didn’t though. instead, i gave them a thumbs up. i think it was enough.

the gma awards are pretty spectacular. there are people like william baldwin there and chynna philips. these people usually present awards, or receive awards, because they are particularly awesome, and i think it’s pretty neat. i mean, once i received an award from brazilian soccer player pele and another time i received an award from one, bible man. both moments are memorable, and this is why they do this -– have awesome people present awards or announce categories.

and so, i’m sitting there, on the front row, in a mauvish jacket, and this girl is standing there in front of me and she is about to make an announcement regarding the next category that an award will be given for particular awesomeness and i have the vague assumption that she is awesome because she is announcing this particular category and all, but i’m not paying particularly close attention. you see, i’ve been staring at my phone for most of the awards ceremony because we have web-cams in our studio and i am not there, since, obviously, i am many miles away at the aforementioned awards ceremony, and i’m watching some good friends of ours playing and singing in our studio and i am terribly distraught that i am not there while they are playing and singing because this is infinitely more awesome (these individuals whom i admire, playing and singing on our recording) than the awesome announcer standing before me announcing the next category of awards. apparently i should have been paying more attention to what was happening in my immediate, physical, surroundings as opposed to being attentive to the goings on of the world wide web.

i vaguely recall hearing the words, “miss america” (seriously, that’s what i thought i heard. it turns out the words were actually “miss usa” and also there was a “1st runner-up” preceding them.) and then there was applause. this was to be expected. typically when people who are awesome are announced there is applause. and so i clapped. the applause continued. i was slightly confused because it passed the duration of typical applause-for-awesomeness length and then it began to swell in volume and so i started looking around. people were beginning to stand up while applauding. i was confused. it’s always difficult to know when it is appropriate to stand while clapping on the front row. if you stand too early you seem over eager. if you stand too late you seem aloof and callused to the moment. so i paid attention. to stand or not stand while clapping for miss america? also, there is the complication that she is exactly one foot in front of me. i decide to watch my good friend, william baldwin. he is standing. i should stand. and so i stand. it then becomes abundantly clear that i am standing exactly one foot from miss america and i have extended my hands to clap. my hands are located right in front of her face which makes them exactly two inches from her nose. she is turning around toward the audience and she is pageant waving, no lie, she is pageant waving. this is awesome. the thought crosses my mind, “wow, she has a great pageant wave!” and then i realize i am clapping my hands, exuberantly, two inches in front of her nose. she sort of ducks back. i, also, sort of duck back and immediately decide to sit back down since i have almost clapped miss america’s nose off and the thought occurs to me that she is probably pretty hacked off about me almost ruining her face and such. and so i sit. and this is when my wife grabs my arm and says, “do you even know why everyone is clapping?” to which i respond, “yeah, it’s miss america and that’s pretty awesome.” to which my wife covers her eyes and states, “this will totally be on cnn tomorrow.” and she was right!

that was last night. this evening, we were sitting in tgi fridays in the dfw airport when i received a text message from a friend informing me that “i” was on the front page of tmz.com. one hour later i received another text message from a different friend informing me that they thought they just saw me on cnn. they had. awkwardly clapping. that was me.

and so it is, with no foresight or thoughtfulness, i have become a politically polarizing artist.

i still feel pretty good about my baldwin thumbs up though. i think we had a moment.

something really funny happened yesterday. well, i thought it was funny. here’s what went down.

mark wrote a song about bwack. this made me laugh. mark raps in it and uses auto tune on his voice just like TI. this also was funny. then mark started talking about a video for the song about bwack. then we got to laughing really hard and thought it would be additionally funny if we told people that we were going to post a song on myspace that would give a little peek at the new album that we’ve been working on, the twist being we’d post the song about bwack, and this would be funny. and so mark did a public service announcement at the end of clip of the day 23 video announcing that we would be posting a song, a peek at the new album, at 10am the following morning. and he sold it too! i mean, i knew what was going on, but the announcement was so effective it made me want to tune in. and so i did. and sure enough, “bwack be creepin’” was there, just as promised, at 10am. i laughed really hard again. and then something unexpected happened.

messages began showing up on our facebook and myspace and twitter indicating that a number of people did not consider this song a joke and believed it to be, in fact, a glimpse into the hard work we have applied ourselves toward in the studio these past few weeks. this made me laugh again, i dare say harder than those moments previously mentioned. i mean, that someone would think it is a possibility that we would include a song about our drummer on an official dc*b release is incredible. it is complimentary, to a very high degree, i think, that we could choose to go in such a distinctively unforeseen direction and a few people would still give us the benefit of the doubt. that’s amazing.

but, i thought it might be helpful to create a list of rules for future reference when evaluating whether we are offering, what in our minds constitutes, a legitimate song possibility for an official dc*b release, or just an opportunity for you to express amusement along with us. so:

1. if we ever use the word “bwack” in a song, it is most likely not going to be on our album.
2. if we ever use the word, “david” or “mark” or “mike” or “jack” in a song, most likely not going to be on our album.
3. if we mention “robots” or “splenda” in a song, safe to say, not going on the album and you are free to laugh.
4. actually, robots are pretty cool, so i take back number 3.
5. i should point out that number 4 was a joke, sort of.
6. also, if you hear bwack talking about building a robot to play drums, he is serious. don’t laugh.
7. and there’s this, mark raps surprisingly good. so, don’t count it out, but if you hear him rapping, it is probably an attempt at humor. unless he’s rapping about something serious, then don’t laugh, he becomes unusually sensitive when he is flowing.

so, having cleared the air, here’s the world premier (actually it was up last night i think) of “bwack be creepin’”. its intended use is mere distraction and provocation of laughter; not composed for purposes of corporate veneration.

today jack and mark are recording guitars. i thought it would be nice, for the 5 people who read this and have interest in such things, to include a description of our guitar signal path. so, here goes:

first, we plug a 1/4 inch instrument cable into something, like a guitar, like this one for instance.

then we plug the other end of the cable into this amp switcher.

it has a pretty blue light.

the reason we do this is so that we can split the signal from the guitar. one cable goes directly into a patch bay that sends it to a preamp, that then sends it back to the patchbay, that then sends it into protools as a direct signal. this is so we can re-amp stuff later if we don’t like the tone and has the great benefit of ease of editing the waves of a direct guitar line are much easier to edit.

out of the other side of the amp switcher we plug into a pedal board, like this one.

or maybe we don’t plug into a pedal board and instead, plug into something more awesome like this.

that was sort of a joke. unless you own that pedal and are into that sort of thing. in that case, it is just down right mean that i would make fun of it. i am sorry.

then out of the pedal board, or awesomer pedal, we then plug into an amp head, like this one.

that goes into a cabinet that we put two mics on like this.

one, directly on the center of the cone up against the grill, and one about an inch back, just a bit out of phase.

then we run those into a console, like this.

we blend the second mic with the first to taste using the second mic to, in essence, adjust eq of the first by jacking with the phase.

these tracks are bussed to one one track, like this.

then we send that to a purple compressor, like this one.

i like purple.

we then go into protools through an aurora converter and then we smile very large smiles.